Walt Whitman is the only great modern poet who does not seem to experience discord when he faces his world. Not even solitude - his monologue is a universal chorus.
The object of poetic activity is essentially language: whatever his beliefs and convictions, the poet is more concerned with words than with what these words designate.
Poetry is not a genre in harmony with the modern world; its innermost nature is hostile or indifferent to the dogmas of modern times, progress and the cult of the future.
To the poet fated to be a poet, self-expression is as natural and as involuntary as breathing is to us ordinary mortals.
Surrealism is not a poetry but a poetics, and even more, and more decisively, a world vision.
Poetry, whatever the manifest content of the poem, is always a violation of the rationalism and morality of bourgeois society.
Poetry is the experience of liberty. The poet risks himself, chances all on the poem's all with each verse he writes.
Any reflection about poetry should begin, or end, with this question: who and how many read poetry books?
Poet: gardener of epitaphs.
What characterizes a poem is its necessary dependence on words as much as its struggle to transcend them.
Poetry is not truth, it is the resurrection of presences.
There can be no society without poetry, but society can never be realized as poetry, it is never poetic. Sometimes the two terms seek to break apart. They cannot.
To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.
For the Chinese, the Greeks, the Mayans, or the Egyptians, nature was a living totality, a creative being. For this reason, art, according to Aristotle, is imitation; the poet imitates the creative gesture of nature.
In each verse, a decision awaits us, and we can't choose to close our eyes and let instinct work on its own. Poetic instinct consists of an alert tension.